Well spotted Ben! I’d looked at their linking requirements document, with which we comply, but hadn’t seen this. It’s odd, because the links comply with their terms except for the fact that we’re donating the money rather than keeping it for ourselves. Were it only implicit that we’d give our earnings to charity it seems we’d be OK; this may be a good approach to take. We’re planning to have someone email Amazon to ask about the general approach of giving earnings to charity, and we’ll see if they object since they’ve already approved our application and linking domains. I’ll continue the conversation with you/anyone else by email.
Update: here’s our ultimate decision. As I say there, Charity Science does have an advantage in running an affiliate account as the commission goes to it (as Amazon intends), and only gets passed through to other charities because all unrestricted money going to us does, as a matter of policy. So it’s not like we’re an individual saying “If you buy through me I’ll donate some money to charity”; it’s a standard case of the money going to the entity that has the affiliate account.
The intent of the rule is to stop you from doing anything that incentivizes people to click on your links instead of going through Amazon the normal way. Amazon doesn’t want to give its affiliates money unless those affiliates actually bring new traffic to Amazon, rather than just routing existing traffic through their affiliate tag. But Amazon can’t say “we’ll only pay you if the person wouldn’t have gone to Amazon otherwise”, so they instead make rules to ban the common cases of this. Even if you only winked and nudged people rather than declaring explicitly that you would donate the earnings to charity, it would be against the spirit, if not the letter, of the rules.
Well spotted Ben! I’d looked at their linking requirements document, with which we comply, but hadn’t seen this. It’s odd, because the links comply with their terms except for the fact that we’re donating the money rather than keeping it for ourselves. Were it only implicit that we’d give our earnings to charity it seems we’d be OK; this may be a good approach to take. We’re planning to have someone email Amazon to ask about the general approach of giving earnings to charity, and we’ll see if they object since they’ve already approved our application and linking domains. I’ll continue the conversation with you/anyone else by email.
Update: here’s our ultimate decision. As I say there, Charity Science does have an advantage in running an affiliate account as the commission goes to it (as Amazon intends), and only gets passed through to other charities because all unrestricted money going to us does, as a matter of policy. So it’s not like we’re an individual saying “If you buy through me I’ll donate some money to charity”; it’s a standard case of the money going to the entity that has the affiliate account.
The intent of the rule is to stop you from doing anything that incentivizes people to click on your links instead of going through Amazon the normal way. Amazon doesn’t want to give its affiliates money unless those affiliates actually bring new traffic to Amazon, rather than just routing existing traffic through their affiliate tag. But Amazon can’t say “we’ll only pay you if the person wouldn’t have gone to Amazon otherwise”, so they instead make rules to ban the common cases of this. Even if you only winked and nudged people rather than declaring explicitly that you would donate the earnings to charity, it would be against the spirit, if not the letter, of the rules.